Scenes from the Life of Saint John the Baptist

Frans Crabbe van Espleghem was one of the leading artists in Mechelen, the capital of the southern Netherlands. He began his career painting altarpieces but after Albrecht Dürer's visit to the Netherlands in 1521, Crabbe began to produce prints. He combined Italianate figure types with a concern for atmosphere and depth in landscape and an emphasis on ordinary daily life and humble people. In 1539 Crabbe took over the workshop of an artist who had introduced the South German etching technique to the North; Crabbe became one of the earliest Netherlandish practitioners of etching. He also made engravings and woodcuts. Using only lines in his etchings, he depicted striking lighting and atmospheric conditions and created graphic equivalents for painting. Crabbe is also noted for the precise preparatory drawings he made for his etchings; in them he combined Netherlandish restraint of gesture and interest in light and shadow with the dashing, delicate pen work of contemporary German artists.